LibGuides: Educator Guide: Crazy for Composting 6-8: Crazy for Composting Educator Guide

Crazy for Composting

Tips to Come Prepared

Before you visit the Genovesi Environmental Study Center (GESC) with your class, review the Educator's Guide to prepare for your students.

Read the Essential Questions (p. 1) and Connections to Standards (p. 2) to decide how you want to link your curriculum with your field trip
Complete the Pre-Visit Lesson with your class activating student interest and engagement
Come to GESC ready to engage and learn with our experiential, hands-on field trip program, Crazy for Compost

Library Finds

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle by Nicky Scott Answers all of your recycling questions with a complete A-Z listing of everyday household items and how to recycle them. From old cell phones and E-waste to expired medicines and motor oil this little guide shows you where you can send your unwanted items and how you might make a bit of money while you're at it. Also includes great ideas for reducing consumption and your volume of trash--ideal for businesses and consumers alike! What do you do with your old mobile phone? Where can you take your old car batteries? Which foods are compostable? What happens to the stuff you recycle? Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is packed with ideas for cutting your consumption and reducing your rubbish. It's an invaluable guide for anyone who wants to slim their bin and help stop the earth going to waste.  
Garbage and Recycling by Rosie Harlow; Sally Morgan Explaining the difference between biodegradable and non-biodegradable garbage, Young Discoverers: Garbage and Recycling by Rosie Harlow and Sally Morgan shows how glass, metal, and wool can be easily recycled. How Can I Help? boxes give suggestions for the young environmentalist who wants to recycle at home.
ISBN: 075345503X
Let It Rot! by Stu Campbell Transform leaves, grass, and kitchen scraps into gardener's gold! This easy-to-use guide shows you how to turn household garbage and backyard refuse into nutrient-filled compost that can nourish your soil and promote a thriving garden. You'll soon be saving money, minimizing waste, and enjoying bountiful harvests.

Essential Questions

What is compost?
Why compost?
What should you compost?
What are the benefits and challenges of different compost systems?

Our Educator Guide

Explore the Crazy for Composting Guide! Click the "Crazy for Composting" educator guide to access information regarding your trip to GESC, pre- and post- lessons, as well as tips on how to make your field trip successful.

Sora eBooks

Access these free ebooks by signing in to the Sora app with your NYC DOE credentials.

Death Eaters by Kelly Milner Halls What happens to the bodies of animals and humans after death? Nature's army of death eaters steps in to take care of clean up. Without these masters of decomposition, our planet would be covered in rotting bodies. This high-interest science text dives into the science behind how bodies decompose.
Worms Eat My Garbage, 35th Anniversary Edition by Mary Appelhof; Joanne Olszewski; Amy Stewart (Foreword by) For more than three decades, this best-selling guide to the practice of vermicomposting has taught people how to use worms to recycle food waste into nutrient-rich fertilizer for houseplants or gardens. Small-scale, self-contained worm bins can be kept indoors, in a basement, or even under the kitchen sink in an apartment -- making vermicomposting a great option for city dwellers and anyone who doesn't want or can't have an outdoor compost pile. The fully revised 35th anniversary edition features the original's same friendly tone, with up-to-date information on the entire process, from building or purchasing a bin (readily available at garden supply stores) to maintaining the worms and harvesting the finished compost.
Trashing the Planet by Stuart A. Kallen On a global scale, humans create around 2.6 trillion pounds of waste every year. None of this trash is harmless--landfills and dumps leak toxic chemicals into soil and groundwater, while incinerators release toxic gases and particles into the air. What can we do to keep garbage from swallowing up Earth? Reducing, reusing, recycling, and upcycling are some of the answers. Learn more about the work of the US Environmental Protection Agency, the Ocean Cleanup Array, the zero waste movement, and the many other government, business, research, and youth efforts working to solve our planet's garbage crisis.
Girls Who Green the World by Diana Kapp Part biography, part guidebook to the contemporary environmental movement, this book is the perfect gift for future and current activists and changemakers! Girls Who Green the World features the inspiring stories of 34 revolutionaries fighting for our future! An inspired collection of profiles, featuring environmental changemakers, social entrepreneurs, visionaries and activists. Journalist Diana Kapp has crisscrossed this country writing for and about empowered girls, girls who expect to be leaders, founders and inventors. This book takes it a step further. It says to girls- while you're striving to be CEOs and world leaders, consider solving the biggest challenge of our lifetime, too-because you can do both at the same time, and here are 34 women doing just that.
Rotten! by Anita Sanchez A funny and fact-filled look at decomposition in all of its slimy glory, illustrated with dazzling full-color art by Gilbert Ford. Vultures, fungi, dung beetles, and more aid in this fascinating and sometimes smelly aspect of the life cycle that's right under our noses. What's that terrible smell? It's the revolting scent of rot. But being rotten isn't necessarily bad. If nothing ever rotted, nothing new could live. Decomposition may seem like the last stop on the food chain, but it's just the beginning. When dead plants and animals decay, they give life to a host of other creatures, and each one helps ecosystems thrive. Decomposition happens in the forest, the ocean--even in your stomach and between your teeth! From vultures and sharks to bacteria, maggots, mushrooms, and more, discover the dirty rotten truth about one of nature's most fascinating processes.

Crazy for Composting

Materials for Pre-Visit Lesson

Household Waste Survey worksheet

Materials for Post-Visit Lesson

Compelling Compost Facts

The Australian Brush-turkey creates huge mounds of compost in order to use the heat generated to incubate its eggs! The mound can produce more than 20 times the heat of the resting parent bird, making it possible to incubate many more eggs than would be possible in a normal nest. After hatching, chicks dig their way out.
President George Washington kept a “stercorary”- a structure devoted to composting manure and plant material- to improve the poor soil at Mount Vernon.
The Vermont Composting Company creates commercial compost using chickens! The chickens eat from the compost pile, and as they do they turn it over. Not only that, as they work the pile they add nitrogen-rich waste.
Cleopatra declared worms to be sacred in 50 BC, and made removal of earthworms from Egypt punishable by death.
Charles Darwin was fascinated by earthworms and investigated them for 40 years, exploring such questions as what foods they prefer (carrots and wild cherry), how they sense the world (they are sensitive to vibrations), and whether they are intelligent (they pull leaves into their burrow by the most efficient method).

Connections to Standards

NEW YORK CITY
PK-8 SCIENCE SCOPE AND SEQUENCE 2018
Grade 6: Unit 3 Ecosystems
Unit 5: Human Impact on Earth's Climate
Grade 7: Unit 5: Minimizing Human Impact Through Engineering Design

NEW YORK STATE P-12 SCIENCE LEARNING STANDARDS
Sixth Grade
MS-LS2-1. Analyze and interpret data to provide evidence for the effects of resource availability on organisms and populations of organisms in an ecosystem.
MS-LS2-2: Construct an explanation that predicts patterns of interactions among organisms in a variety of ecosystems.
MS-LS2-3: Develop a model to describe the cycling of matter and flow of energy among living and nonliving parts of an ecosystem.
MS-LS2-4: Construct an argument supported by empirical evidence that changes to physical or biological components of an ecosystem affect populations.
MS-ESS3-3 Apply scientific principles to design a method for monitoring and minimizing a human impact on the environment.
MS-ESS3-5 Ask questions to clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the rise in global temperatures over the past century.

Seventh Grade
MS-ESS3-1. Construct a scientific explanation based on evidence for how the uneven distributions of Earth's mineral, energy, and groundwater resources are the result of past and current geologic processes.
MS-ESS3-3. Apply scientific principles to design a method for monitoring and minimizing a human impact on the environment.
MS-ESS3-4 Construct an argument supported by evidence for how increases in human population and per-capita consumption of natural resources impact Earth's systems.

Living Environment - Core Curriculum
Key Idea 2: Beyond the use of reasoning and consensus, scientific inquiry involves the testing of proposed explanations involving the use of conventional techniques and procedures and usually requiring considerable ingenuity.
Key Idea 7: Human decisions and activities have had a profound impact on the physical and living environment.

Earth Science - Core Curriculum
Key Idea 2: Many of the phenomena that we observe on Earth involve interactions among components of air, water, and land.